Dave Starling » Service Providers

Apple’s .me: Epic Fail?

Dave Starling — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 08:20:18 +0000

Apple’s .mac replacement, .me, has be frought with problems since the switchover that coincided with the launch of the iPhone 3G. The old .mac service was taken offline whilst the migration to .me took place, and was originally scheduled to be no more than a few hours. A day and a half later, and people still couldn’t access the service. Those that could login, myself included, found that the web applications would work sporadically, and then wouldn’t be able to access the service for a length of time.

Apple sorted the problems out, and gave everyone a 30-day extension to their trial periods. However, yesterday I had more problems accessing .me. My iPhone wouldn’t sync, Mail.app couldn’t connect, and when I logged in to the webmail interface I was presented with a blank screen. Apple even went to post a trouble ticket about the problem, but disabled their discussion boards which were undoubtedly getting filled with complaints about the poor quality of service. They claim that only 1% of users were affected, but I find this hard to believe given their previous problems.

Apart from these shenanigans, Apple also screwed up the UK billing and extended everyone’s trial periods by another 30 days.

I want to like .me. I set up a .mac account a few days before it launched so I could get the name I wanted and beat the queues. I wanted to use the Push functionality of the iPhone 2.0 software, as well as online contact and calendar syncing (which itself is buggy). At the current level of service, however, I think I could see myself heading back towards GMail. If only they offered a push service!

Amazon’s S3 Outage Redux

Dave Starling — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 18:51:33 +0000

Amazon’s S3 outage yesterday lasted a total over 7 hours, and brought down SmugMug, Twitter‘s avatar hosting, and crashed Twinkle – a Twitter application for the iPhone, as well as Youniverse‘s image hosting. Youniverse uses Akamai as a CDN with S3 as the ‘origin server’, and is set with a TTL of 5 days. I think after yesterday’s outage I’ll be changing Akamai to permanently cache the objects and refresh them manually (we never have needed to do that, and it’s unlikely we ever will). Akamai is a more distributed platform and is, hopefully, less likely to have a similar incident.

This is Amazon’s second major outage this year, and given how many sites rely on the service it’s a real nightmare when it goes down. It’s a little concerning to think about some of the other third-party providers that could exhibit similar problems. For example, those using Yahoo‘s YUI library might well be accessing them from Yahoo’s JavaScript site, rather than hosting the files themselves. In the even that these go down, the sites will likely be rendered useless, in a rather ungraceful manner. Fortunately, JavaScript, CSS, and the like can all be easily hosted locally. Hundreds of gigabytes of photos are not so easy to have local backups of.

Amazon S3 – Service Unavailable

Dave Starling — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 20:27:59 +0000

Amazon’s S3 service is having some major outages right now. This is the first major downtime I’ve seen from them, apart from an hour or so in February, and is rather frustrating because Youniverse uses S3 as its photo host, but Akamai as a CDN. Even though Akamai will cache for a period of time, it will ultimately pass through what S3 delivers. In this case, a “Service Unavailable” message.

Youniverse isn’t the only site that uses S3 as a major provider of service. SmugMug have completely taken down their site until S3 is running properly again, and Twitter are not showing profile images.

Amazon’s Status Blog indicates that they’ve solved the problem, and are making “incremental progress”. Looks like we’re going to have to come up with a fallback solution for when S3 goes belly-up again!